13&9

The video is part of an overall concept for 13&9 design that revolves around the soul of the design itself. As we have been supporting the label from the very beginning on, the conception phase was also a collaborative process of discovery with the owners, focussing on the true essence of their brand.

We wanted to capture the contrasts found in 13&9 design (man/woman, black/white, angular/curved) and present them timelessly in the video, reducing the broad product range to the very core of any design, namely points, lines and surfaces.

Everything in the video comes from the brand itself. We didn’t want to add or invent anything that didn’t already exist. Even the use of dancers as a neutral projection surface – representing the idea (or soul) of the designer – stems from the history of 13&9.

Moreover the video pays homage to great thinkers such as Walt Whitman, Thomas Moore and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose thoughts on the human soul are displayed as projected extracts in the video.

We knew early on that instead of taking the usual approach of relying on post production techniques we wanted to work with typography, graphic design and animations live on set. As a result, creating these projections and carrying out the tests and rehearsals was the most important and time-consuming part of the collaboration after the concept phase.

The video was filmed in one day in a studio with minimal basic lighting and a powerful digital projector. The projections were in part adapted and edited on set.